I've noticed this to be true of the creative agencies that I want to work for- their website's don't say a thing about what they actually can do for you, their work just speaks for themselves. But it takes a large amount of pedigree to get that point, it's really intimidating. This is something that's never really occurred to me, at all. I've always been a relentless optimizer of consumer goods, probably starting with my dad who cynically taught me the base costs of food whenever we ate out, more relevantly, an ex who taught me what materials and seams she looked for at clothing sales that said that a piece of clothing was quality. The behavioral psychology nut in me loves thinking about prices, costs, and presentation, but damn, is it only good for waxing academic. I must look like an idiot looking at the cheap shit first. The unnerving thing about the chickenshit watches (and about watches in general), is that as a designer, the easy minimal stuff is sexy to me. When I was first getting into graphic design, I went through Ebay dreaming about buying a minimalist Braun watch. I went with cheap minimal Casio watches instead, they scream "college student" and I love that. I'm still at the stage of my life where spending more than $20 on a watch is the watch equivalent of Mitch Hedberg's pen joke: I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring. You might get a kick out of this: My current daily driver is a casio sportwatch with the beeper and the mode button disabled. I have it permenantly set to stop watch mode so I can figure out how long it takes for me to drive places. Regardless, the general gist was that when dealing with truly rich people, you follow a "push" paradigm ("you should buy this one particular thing") rather than a "pull" paradigm ("we sell all sorts of wonderful things")
Now - they had to have known that if I scruffed over to drive the cheapest car they had, I wasn't likely to buy it. But they also knew that I'd tell all my friends what a good time I had, and chances are good that I'll make more money as I get older.
Dan Pink and others have pointed out that once you hit a certain salary, you no longer worry about money. In the US that salary seems to be about $70k of discretionary spending a year (before you account for things like the local real estate market, etc), assuming no kids. That's more than most people have, though. As such, there's a lot of sales to people below that line who aspire to be above that line (which, in fairness, was a point made by your premium mediocre post). Thing is, those chickenshit watches are all derivative. The whole point of the presentation was to outline how derivative they truly are. Your watch is not minimal. It is speaking its own design language and it is speaking it clearly. There's nothing derivative about Casio; they make exactly what they make, and they make it well. They make it for what it costs plus a profit margin; things lose that directness when you start talking about the haute couture watches. This is a Roger Smith. It's 1 of 1. It was a gift to the British government or some shit and as such doesn't have a price. Thing is, Roger Smith has a workshop that employs 5 people, and they make less than 10 watches a year. That means above and beyond materials cost, each watch costs six months' salary of a trained artisan. It's less minimalist than the chickenshit watches, but not by a lot. What it has is a lot of individual craftsmanship and some great material. On the other hand, this is an Ochs & Junior: That's a perpetual calendar with moon phase but it's a lot less ornamented than any of your "minimalist" chickenshit watches. I don't think you can configure one for less than 10k euro. And then, there's always Movado: You can get into one of those for a lot less than a grand. Or, around a thousandth as much as a Moser.
